LONDON — Mark Carney may find himself dropped into an old-fashioned British bear pit when he crosses the pond this summer to become the next governor of the Bank of England.

Canada’s top banker will get a foretaste of public life in the city that still styles itself the banking capital of the world when he is examined for three hours on Thursday by the British Parliament’s Treasury Select Committee. It is not a U.S.-style confirmation hearing, which sometimes are quite hostile. It is expected to be a gentler three-hour inquisition, which for the first time ever, a governor-designate must endure.

The looming monetary policy question of the moment is whether Carney will tip his hand to the 13 MPs on the committee about exceeding the Bank of England’s long-standing two-per-cent inflation target, which he hinted at in December and then appeared to backtrack a bit. The other part of this equation is how much money he thinks should be pumped into Britain’s wobbly economy to stimulate growth and avoid a triple-dip recession that many economists believe is looming and could last well into next year.

The bank’s first foreign governor will also surely be asked about interest rates, the rate of the pound, which has been forecast to decline, Prime Minister David Cameron’s government’s stark austerity budgets and plans announced Monday to give the bank’s governor sweeping powers to prevent the most egregious, casino-like excesses of the country’s leading banks.

At a time when the British economy is contracting, most ministries are slashing their budgets by 30 per cent again this year and the armed forces is being hit with cuts of historic proportions, it is inevitable that Carney will get questions about the tone he is setting, having been poached from Canada for what amounts to nearly $1.37-million a year at Tuesday’s exchange rate.

As has been noted by British national newspapers, that will make the Harvard and Oxford man from Fort Smith, N.W.T., the world’s highest-paid central bank chief, with almost double the salary and other perquisites of Sir Mervyn King, whom he is to succeed.

Carney’s “package,” as executive compensation is usually called in the U.K., includes a housing allowance of $391,000 a year. That is a staggering sum compared with whatever the Carneys have been paying to live in Ottawa’s upscale Rockcliffe Park. But even in southern England’s stratospheric housing market, that kind of dosh will pay for an extravagant pile in Mayfair or posh digs in the Home Counties.

Of greater interest to Canadians is whether the parliamentarians ask Carney about his political ambitions back home. It may come up because he specifically asked for a five-year term as governor, rather than the usual eight years. Such a timeline might not be enough to turn around the British economy, but it would put Carney in the frame to oppose Stephen Harper as leader of the Liberal Party some time after Canada’s next federal election.

Few of these questions would probably have arisen in the past. The Bank of England was a gentleman’s club cut off from the thrust and parry of Parliament and constant media attention. But with Europe’s sordid books casting such a pall everywhere and Britain doing not that much better economically than Greece, Spain and Portugal, it has suddenly become a vastly different world. The level of interest in Britain about what Carney says and does cannot be underestimated.

Adding to this toxic mix, the proverbial Sword of Damocles now hangs over Cameron and his Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne. They are under tremendous pressure from their Conservative Party to reverse the economic slide before general elections fixed to take place in 2015. Meanwhile, the U.S., with which Britain is forever comparing itself, seems to finally be doing a little better. So, of course, are Canada, Australia and much of Asia, leaving many here bewildered and wondering if Blighty can ever catch up.

Hailed by the media as international banking’s “rock star,” its “messiah” and its “white knight,” the 47-year old former Edmonton Journal paper boy and Edmonton Oilers fan arrives at a time when the public has great expectations and is fed up with austerity, frugality and Europe. A key issue will be how much leeway the incoming governor is given, and whether — and to what degree — he may try to reflate the economy. He is expected to demand that banks stop dipping into their retail banking operations to finance their adventures, but it is thought unlikely that he will wage a public war against bank executives who have been on their back heels for several years.

There is great potential for Carney to be heroic in his new job. But riding in with a handsome salary and other emoluments when the huge bonuses that bank executives have been getting have been under intense scrutiny brings its own perils. How will Carney and his wife, Diana, who is said to be an environmentalist and a bit of a leftie, take to the tabloids peering in their kitchen window, snapping pictures of their cars and parsing their private lives and those of their daughters?

Or, as the Telegraph put it Monday: Carney’s “wife’s jaunts to the supermarket on her bike will no longer be possible.” It promises to be a circus unlike anything they have had in Canada.

If Carney stumbles out of the gate, he could quickly be attacked as a greenhorn. Left unsaid in Britain, but nevertheless often still a factor, is that Carney, with his flat mid-Atlantic accent, is a colonial. We are not talking about how the Brits treated colonials at Gallipoli or Dieppe. But as Sir Mervyn sniffed a few weeks ago, there is a different matrix in Britain than in countries such as Canada.

“If things go badly, they’ll shout, ‘Who the f— is he?’” a supremely well-connected British friend told me the other day. “Carney had it easy managing the Canadian economy at a time when there was a resource-based boom in trade with China and Asia. He had no experience of a banking crisis or of that other terror, which is runaway inflation.”

There is also the not-so-small matter of Carney being an outsider to an institution where many of the personal loyalties and sympathies of senior officials will still be with those he pipped for the job.

The sense in London is that Carney’s record in Canada, as good as it is, does not mean much. Mentioned more often have been the years that he spent with Goldman Sachs and his current chairmanship of the G-20’s Financial Stability Board. That is what gives him credibility, which was reinforced by the good reviews he got for his performance at last week’s global business gathering in Davos, where he was described as calm and authoritative.

Carney is younger and better educated than the grey men who usually run the Bank of England. He is also famously well spoken, thoughtful and dynamic. These are precisely the reasons why Cameron chose him for such a powerful job at such a volatile time.

Thursday’s appearance before the Treasury Select Committee is of crucial importance because it offers Carney a chance to create a good first impression as a bit of a radical — but not too much of a one — who can rescue a wounded economy and restore confidence in the Bank of England.

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